How is Flash Doing?

Over the last year there have been many rumors about death of Flash, just as rumors about its second life, inspired by Apache and new Adobe AIR features. Since the release of IntelliJ IDEA 11.1 we gather Usage Statistics, which helps us understand better your real needs and allocate resources correspondingly. The statistics of course does not represent the full worldwide picture, but it lets us analyse how IntelliJ IDEA is used for ActionScript and Flex development.

The good news, as it turns out, is that the number of active ActionScript and Flex developers has been growing constantly. As a proof, here’s a chart showing how many times Flash Run Configuration was started each month:

Here are some more Flash-related statistics in case you’re interested.

Target platform:

Pure ActionScript vs Flex:

Maven Flexmojos vs standard project setup:

As a conclusion we would like to say a huge thank you to all who agreed to send Anonymous Usage Statistics to JetBrains.

If you haven’t done this since you first started IntelliJ IDEA, please open Settings (Preferences on Mac), search for the Usage Statistics settings page and select the checkbox.

16 Responses to How is Flash Doing?

I’d say the only conclusion you can take out of that chart is, and using your own sentence, that “the number of active ActionScript and Flex developers using IntelliJ IDEA has been growing constantly”.

Just to let you know, there are a couple more IDEA ActionScript developers out there who just happen to not invoke “Flash Run Configuration”, so we are not part of that statistic. We use Jangaroo to compile ActionScript to JavaScript, so we take advantage of the nifty support IDEA offers for ActionScript, but never actually run the code in FlashPlayer or AIR.
Keep on the good work!

Thanks for sharing such an insight. I do agree that Flash is imortal and can not be just dead any day.
I was looking at some HTML 5 books and am surprised, every single example is compared with Flash and try to meet its level, though its hard to do so and funny at the same time.

@Judah, @YopSolo I believe that getting started with Flex or ActionScript project in IntelliJ IDEA is pretty intuitive, though agree that we at JetBrains should post some tutorials ourselves. You can look through IntelliJ IDEA help (Help | Help Topics | Language and Framework-Specific Guidelines | ActionScript and Flex) or search for some 3rd party ‘getting started’ blog posts in the Internet or just try New Project | Flash Module and follow very simple wizard.

GREAT!!!!… I was thinking to move to HTML5 and after writing a small enterprise application I am frustrated with it to test it on various browsers with a number of frameworks a very BAD experience with HTML5

@Anatole ActionScript Compiler 2.0 (which has the same code base as Falcon compiler for MXML) is already supported for a long time. As far as I know Falcon compiler that supports MXML is not in beta quality yet, so it is not supported yet.